Only got 37 percent.
  • Only got 37 percent.
I've been spending a few days looking at what happened in the Rumbaugh vs. Johnson primary race for state supreme court (here, here, and here). Now comes Josh Friedes, spokesperson for the gay advocacy group Equal Rights Washington, who says: "This election should be a huge warning shot to the progressive community.”

He's talking about the entire primary election, not just the Rumbaugh race, and he sees the results across the board as a sign that conservatives are energized. “This is a very scary situation," Friedes tells me. "And I think what is going on right now is we have a very angry conservative electorate."

Ok. But we've been hearing a lot about this already—the so-called enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats this year. What about Rumbaugh sepcifically? What happened?

“With respect to Rumbaugh: Am I disappointed by the results? Absolutely,” Friedes says. “I just don’t think that we were lucky.”

Couldn't the gay rights community have made its own luck by making sure Rumbaugh had enough cash to defeat the gay-marriage-opposing Johnson?

“If a lot more money had been raised, yeah, it is possible," Friedes says. "But that type of thing is always a challenge.”

He says he's "really proud" of the work ERW did to support Rumbaugh—donating $8,000 directly to a political action committee that was working against Johnson, conducting get-out-the-vote phone banks—but that "the huge problem was that Rumbaugh was identified as a candidate very very late.”

Is dumping just $8,000 into a statewide race something to be "really proud" of?

“We have to do some soul searching about the level of money being raised and put into campaigns," Friedes says. "Because ultimately, who sits on the bench and who is in Olympia is going to determine an awful lot of outcomes.”

One problem, Friedes tells me, is that the gay legal community has been reluctant to pour money into judicial races because of a philosophical opposition to the idea of electing judges. Whether the gay legal community should continue to live in the world it wishes existed (no elected state supreme court justices) or the world as it is (Washington State does, in fact, elect its supreme court justices) is part of a "long-term conversation" that needs to happen, Friedes tells me.

"We did not raise as much money as we would have liked to have raised," Friedes says. "But I do not believe we were asleep at the wheel."

An entire thread devoted to deconstructing the Rumbaugh loss—including the theory that he just didn't have good enough teeth—is right here.